USAID effectively ran India’s National Family Health Survey from 1990s: Sanjeev Sanyal

New Delhi: Sanjeev Sanyal, member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) on Monday said those concerned about USAID’s interference in Indian elections should be equally concerned about USAID’s tentacles in India’s medical system and social policies.

In a post on X social media platform, Sanyal said that USAID “effectively ran India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS) from the 1990s till it was stopped two years ago”.

“This is the most important medical dataset in India and drives a lot of health policy. Not only were we allowing a foreign agency to harvest our medical data but, by allowing them to design surveys and direct analysis, we were letting them influence our national health responses,” he emphasised.

Equally worryingly, much of the NFHS questionnaire was deliberately skewed to support certain social narratives, according to the ace economist.

“The questionnaire for men, for instance, is only 29 pages but that for women is 94 pages. A lot of the additional questions are deliberately worded to elicit a narrative of intra-family violence against Indian women. Must say, very slyly done,” he further stated.

According to Sanyal, late Bibek Debroy and he strongly pushed back against this (including publicly in newspaper columns).

“Fortunately, GoI took up the matter and the latest NFHS is being done by the Health Ministry on its own,” he maintained.

A statement from the United States Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an agency led by billionaire Elon Musk, recently declared that it had cancelled a series of international funding projects.

Among these was the $21 million allocated for voter turnout in India.

“Would love to find out who received the $21mn spent to improve ‘voter turnout in India’ and the $29mn to ‘strengthening political landscape in Bangladesh’; not to mention the $29mn spend to improve ‘fiscal federalism’ in Nepal. USAID is the biggest scam in human history,” Sanyal had earlier posted on X.

IANS